"Public health is intertwined with politics in the United States, and often with the politics of fear and blame."
Gregg Gonsalves
A Yale researcher says the current panic over Ebola in the U.S. brings back some bad memories.
Gregg Gonsalves said that in the the early days of the AIDS epidemic, there were calls for quarantines. "We had calls from people like William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator, for tattooing gay men on their buttocks and drug users on their arms," he said. "You know, that was a real domestic epidemic. There were hundreds, thousands, ten of thousands of people infected with the disease in the U.S. Here, we have a pseudo-epidemic. We have a few isolated cases, but the reaction has been almost as overblown as what happened in the old days of AIDS."
Gonsalves is co-director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, an initiative of the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health.
"Public health is intertwined with politics in general in the United States," Gonsalves said, "and often with the politics of fear and blame. Back in the old days of HIV, it was hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin users, and Haitians. They were targeted 'the four Hs' by the CDC as risk groups."
Gonsalves, who is HIV-positive, said current Ebola quarantine policies in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut are unnecessary and counterproductive. He blames politicians and the media.
"I think Governor Christie, and Cuomo, and Malloy realized that this was making many people in the U.S. nervous," Gonsalves said. "Instead of heeding public health advice, they decided to shore up their right flank. I think the media has been spectacularly irresponsible. You heard anybody but their medical people, who got to speak about this on the air, making these inflated, exaggerated claims about the infectiousness of the virus, about the need for travel bans and quarantines, speaking really about things that they had no evidence to support."
Gonsalves worries that quarantine policies could worsen the epidemic of Ebola in West Africa if they dissuade health care workers from traveling there to tend to the sick. His article, "Panic, Paranoia and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic’s Lesson for Ebola," is published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
